In an opening scene of Netflix’s “I Care A Lot”, Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), a professional legal guardian, sits behind her desk while mafia lawyer Dean Ericson (Chris Messina) threatens her not so subtly. Messina’s character wears three-piece suits and looks removed from the pages of GQ, albeit with a stubble too much for a male model. He exudes masculinity.
Marla doesn’t want him there. Out of connivance with a doctor, Marla has just received custody from a woman named Jennifer, whom she sent to an asylum (without her consent) when she took control of all of Jennifer’s assets. Dean introduces himself to Marla as Jennifer’s lawyer and insists that there was an error regarding Jennifer’s debilitating state.
Marla lies to Dean and tells him that Jennifer’s condition has suddenly worsened two weeks ago. “This is simply not true, Mrs. Grayson,” Dean urges. “You know, I know. If the doctor wrote a note, he knows it too.”
“She,” corrects Marla quickly. “The doctor. She is she.”
This bitter response is at the heart of Marla’s worldview: men, as she says, want to defeat her. Fittingly, her co-workers – or henchmen – are almost entirely women, as is the doctor she works with to subdue involuntary elderly people.
The asterisk for Marla’s feminist ethos is that this great cabal of feminine power is doing tremendously bad things. The doctor helps Marla find innocent elderly people and kidnap them legally in the courts, depriving them of control of their assets so that Marla can profit as her guardian. In fact, those who try to get in their way are usually men – often lawyers and family members of the deceived elderly. But his view of the world of man versus woman is a serious misunderstanding.
And this is where the politics of the film get interesting.
Marla symbolizes the modern ideal of a “chief girl”: the businesswoman whose success is defined in opposition to the male business world in which she swims upstream. The term, often written with a hashtag, became popular around 2014 with the publication of the eponymous book by Sophia Amoruso, founder of retailer Nasty Gal. In a retrospective on neologism published in The Atlantic, Amanda Mull described the philosophy of # girlboss-ism as a kind of “convenient incrementalism”. Mull writes: “Instead of dismantling the power that men have long wielded in America, career women could simply take it for themselves in the office.” She continues: “Like Sheryl Sandberg’s self-help success ‘Lean In’ before that, ‘#Girlboss’ argued that the professional success of ambitious women was two-rabbit activism: their search for power could be renamed as a fair search for equality, and the success of women executives and entrepreneurs would elevate women below them. ”
This describes Marla as a T: convinced that her relentless attack on the elderly is some kind of just search for equality. However, contrary to the Platonic ideal of a chief girl, Marla’s business is deeply immoral. And its “customers”, the people whose lives it destroys, are men and women. It seems that some women can have everything – but only if other women have nothing.
An entire wall of Marla’s office displays pictures of all of her “pupils,” which she branded with talent to indicate particularly lucrative brands. And although she is an explorer of equal opportunities for the elderly, it is a clever script that the veteran who disturbs his whole scheme is a woman too (played with ease by Dianne Wiest).
Marla’s evil countenance – and, ultimately, her punishment – is a poignant accusation of the feminine race of feminism and an astonishing policy for a Netflix film as well. “I Care A Lot” complicates the neo-liberal feminist message in a surprising way that I had never seen before in the film. Specifically, he points to the immorality of capitalist feminism, the way it depends on exploitation.
Remove the industry from Marla’s legal frontier, the world of guardianship and its message and politics are indistinguishable from so many other feminist capitalist CEOs in the world. Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, became a household name when she published “Lean In,” a hybrid business book and feminist manifesto. The 2013 book was a bestseller, praised for its message of empowerment and an egalitarian vision of Sandberg for a post-gender world. “A truly equal world would be one in which women run half of our countries and businesses and men run half of our homes,” writes Sandberg.
A commendable sight, certainly. Then, years later, the reality of Sandberg’s daily work on Facebook was revealed: routinely allowing partners to violate the privacy of their users, covering up Facebook’s role in the propagation of election propaganda, and hiring opposition polling companies to clean up the mess of detractors company. This included using a public relations firm to attack George Soros using anti-Semitic whistles.
The compartmentalized ethics of Sheryl Sandberg and the fictional Marla Grayson are so similar that it seems impossible that Marla is not at least partially based on Sandberg or perhaps Amoruso as well – who became famous for having a hauntingly similar haircut to Rosamund Pike in the film, and whose company went bankrupt a few years after the famous publication of “#GirlBoss”, which praised his business acumen.
The brilliance of “I Care A Lot” is that it illustrates how the exploitation of other humans (regardless of gender) is the key to both capitalism. Sure, Marla’s guardianship business is an extreme case, but it serves as a metaphor for capitalism in general, as it is a means to an end for Marla – who wants power and money more than anything. She is never happier in the film than when she is reveling in her wealth or success – “success”, in this case, meaning depriving another involuntary elderly person of her freedom and tearing up her assets to extract Marla.
It is a fascinating counterpoint to another recent film, “Promising young woman”, which had a clearer feminist message by discovering how men – even so-called “good” men – can be complicit in cultivating environments that make sexual assault and sexual exploitation possible. rape. The men in that movie occasionally apologized, but they could never be redeemed.
But in “I Care A Lot”, Marla is irredeemable. As if undressing her pupil’s assets and sending them into a prison-like existence isn’t horrible enough, she treats Jennifer even worse when she finds out that she has a lawyer by her side: take Jennifer’s phone and instruct the team from the nursing home to drug her in ways that will mentally torture her. You go, boss girl.
I see “I Care a Lot” as a warning against this type of “disfigured feminism”, as Dawn Foster calls the Sheryl Sandberg ethos. Stripped of any broader structural understanding of someone’s role in a larger universe of exploration and work, the barbarity of Marla’s “business” is horrible to behold. Thus, Girlboss Marla is a profoundly execrable character – a warning to what happens when someone’s feminism is isolated and separated from any larger moral universe.